The Interrupted Reading: The Kids with George W. Bush on 9/11

There has rarely been a starker juxtaposition of evil and innocence than the moment President George W. Bush received the news about 9/11 while reading The Pet Goat with second-graders in Sarasota, Fla.

Seven-year-olds can’t understand what Islamic terrorism is all about. But they know when an adult’s face is telling them something is wrong — and none of the students sitting in Sandra Kay Daniels’ class at Emma E. Booker Elementary School that morning can forget the devastating change in Bush’s expression when White House chief of staff Andrew Card whispered the terrible news of the al-Qaeda attack. Lazaro Dubrocq’s heart started racing because he assumed they were all in trouble — with no less than the Commander in Chief — but he wasn’t sure why. “In a heartbeat, he leaned back and he looked flabbergasted, shocked, horrified,” recalls Dubrocq, now 17. “I was baffled. I mean, did we read something wrong? Was he mad or disappointed in us?”

(See pictures of people celebrating Osama bin Laden’s death.)

Similar fears started running through Mariah Williams’ head. “I don’t remember the story we were reading — was it about pigs?” says Williams, 16. “But I’ll always remember watching his face turn red. He got really serious all of a sudden. But I was clueless. I was just 7. I’m just glad he didn’t get up and leave, because then I would have been more scared and confused.” Chantal Guerrero, 16, agrees. Even today, she’s grateful that Bush regained his composure and stayed with the students until The Pet Goat was finished. “I think the President was trying to keep us from finding out,” says Guerrero, “so we all wouldn’t freak out.”

Even if that didn’t happen, it’s apparent that the sharing of that terrifying Tuesday with Bush has affected those students in the decade since — and, they say, it made the news of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s killing by U.S. commandos on May 1 all the more meaningful. Dubrocq, now a junior at Riverview High School in Sarasota, doubts that he would be a student in the rigorous international-baccalaureate program if he hadn’t been with the President as one of history’s most infamous global events unfolded. “Because of that,” he says, “I came to realize as I grew up that the world is a much bigger place and that there are differing opinions about us out there, not all of them good.”

(See pictures of the evolution of Ground Zero.)

Guerrero, today a junior at the Sarasota Military Academy, believes the experience “has since given us all a better understanding of the situation, sort of made us take it all more seriously. At that age, I couldn’t understand how anyone could take innocent lives that way. And I still of course can’t. But today I can problem-solve it all a lot better, maybe better than other kids because I was kind of part of it.” Williams, also a junior at the military academy, says those moments spent with Bush conferred on the kids a sort of historical authority as they grew up. “Today, when we talk about 9/11 in class and you hear kids make mistakes about what happened with the President that day, I can tell them they’re wrong,” she says, “because I was there.”

(Watch TIME’s video of the celebration at Ground Zero after Osama bin Laden’s death.)

One thing the students would like to tell Bush’s critics — like liberal filmmaker Michael Moore, whose 2004 documentary Fahrenheit 911 disparaged Bush for lingering almost 10 minutes with the students after getting word that two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center — is that they think the President did the right thing. “I think he was trying to keep everybody calm, starting with us,” says Guerrero. Dubrocq agrees: “I think he was trying to protect us.” Booker Principal Gwendolyn Tose-Rigell, who died in 2007, later insisted, “I don’t think anyone could have handled it better. What would it have served if [Bush] had jumped out of his chair and ran out of the room?”

See TIME’s 2001 cover story on the 9/11 attacks.

See pictures of the devastation on Sept. 11, 2001.

See TIME’s full coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death.

When the children’s story was done, Bush left for the school’s library, where he discussed the New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania nightmare with aides, reporters and another group of students waiting for him. Back in the classroom, Daniels brought in a television and turned on the first bewildering images of the Twin Towers in flames and smoke. At that point, the kids started connecting the dots. “It was pretty scary,” says Williams, “and I remember thinking, So that’s why the President looked so mad.”

(See pictures of the evolution of Ground Zero.)

Dubrocq got mad himself. “But I had to wait a few years before I could digest what had really happened and why they attacked us,” he says. “I, of course, grew up to have nothing but contempt for Osama bin Laden.” Yet he adds the episode “motivated me to get a better handle on the world and to want to help improve the world.” It also made Dubrocq, who wants to study international business, more aware of his multinational roots — he’s French and Cuban on his father’s side and Spanish and Mexican on his mother’s. Not surprisingly, he also wants to learn other languages, like Chinese and, in an echo of his 9/11 memories, perhaps even Arabic.

Williams says she also hated bin Laden more as she grew up and gained a better appreciation of how fanatics had changed her world on 9/11. “All that just because he wanted to control everybody in the world, control how we think and what we do,” she says. Williams doesn’t plan to pursue a military career — she wants to be a veterinarian — but the military-academy student was impressed by the Navy Seal raid in Pakistan that killed bin Laden: “I was shocked. I thought after 10 years, they’d never find him. But what the SEALs did, it, like, gives me even more respect for that kind of training.”

(See “The Accused 9/11 Plotters: What Happened to Them?”)

Guerrero, in fact, may as well be part of that training. She also plans a civilian life — she hopes to study art and musical theater — but she’s a Junior ROTC member and part of her school’s state champion Raiders team, which competes against other academies in contests like rope-bridge races, map navigation and marksmanship. In other words, the same sort of skills the Seal commandos have to master. She admits to feeling an added rush when she woke up to Monday morning’s news: the Seals’ operation, she says, “was very, very cool.”

More than cool, Guerrero adds, it was also “so reassuring, after a whole decade of being scared about these things.” Most of all, it “brought back a flood of memories” of their tragic morning with a President — memories that prove kids can carry a lot heavier stuff in those plastic backpacks than adults often realize.

See a portrait of a heroic 9/11 firefighter.

See pictures of the battle against the Taliban.

See TIME’s full coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death.